Stories 1 - REMIND & MAgPIE stories #1

The Network for Greening the Financial System has developed long-term climate scenarios for financial institutions, aligned with latest climate impact and climate transition science. The scenarios – stemming from an ensemble of models including three Integrated Assessment Models, the macroeconomic model NiGEM, and tools for climate impact projections – provide a carefully designed set of climate transition pathways describing the interaction between the economy, energy, land and climate systems. The NGFS long-term scenarios are specifically designed for central banks and supervisors to assess and quantify both transition and physical risks related to various climate policy ambitions. The risk assessments can be tailored to stress-test the financial system, to inform macro-economic policy and to explore alignment of investment strategies with long-term climate goals and climate impacts.

Transitioning to healthier diets is promoted to improve health and reduce environmental pressures. In China, two benchmarks can be used to define the transition. The Chinese Dietary Guidelines reflect national nutrition recommendations, while the EAT-Lancet diet defines a global reference diet aligning human health with planetary boundaries. Existing comparisons focus largely on dietary composition and consumption-based footprints, while production, expenditure, and trade-linked implications remain less clear. Using a China-specific version of MAgPIE, this study develops scenarios based on both frameworks and examines their effects on production, food expenditure, emissions, land and water use. Given China’s large role in global food demand and trade, the analysis further traces potential spillover effects across world regions. The study offers insights into whether national guidance and global sustainable diet benchmarks provide compatible or competing pathways for transformation.

The REMIND model has sustained contributions to the EU 2040 climate target debate. Initial REMIND-EU analyses informed the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change (ESABCC) on emissions budgets, supporting its official target advice. REMIND analyses further explored cost-efficient pathways under uncertainty, focusing on sectoral transformation and energy milestones. This quantitative evidence supported EU policy discussions and was consolidated in a 2026 Nature Communications publication. The policy debate translated into legislative action: by early 2026, EU framework shifted toward a binding 2040 target of a 90% net GHG reduction relative to 1990, limiting international credits and emphasizing domestic cuts. Ongoing discussions now focus on detailed sectoral targets, where PIK’s science-based analyses continue to inform the debate.

The recent update of MAgPIE’s baseline land-use map to LUH3 offered an opportunity to assess how well the new dataset represents Brazilian specificities. In this proposed story, we present the progress made toward building new initial land-use maps using Brazilian data sources. Analysis of the LUH3 maps revealed that agricultural areas do not match national realities, partly due to how the “Mosaic of Uses” MapBiomas class was handled in the harmonization. A separate issue concerns the split between primary and secondary forests, where FAO diverges from MAgPIE’s class definitions, leading to overestimation of secondary forest area for Brazil. To address both issues, we are building new initial land-use maps integrating MapBiomas land cover, secondary vegetation and irrigated area, IBGE cropland area, and carbon stock data from Brazil’s 4th National Inventory to reclassify low-biomass areas currently mapped as forest. We will discuss remaining challenges toward this implementation.

Functional connectivity of protected areas (PAs) is critical to global biodiversity but is increasingly threatened by agriculture expansion, which isolates species and heightens extinction risk. Using an integrated framework, we evaluate how functional connectivity, measured by mammal movement probability (MMP) and protected area isolation (PAI), responds to food-system transformation and ecosystem stewardship (EcoS). Without intervention, global functional connectivity deteriorates from 2020 to 2070 (-2.0% in MMP and +3.7% in PAI), alongside substantial regional variability (PAI ranging from 8.5% decline in Europe to 16.9% increase in Africa). Food-system transformation and EcoS each mitigate this deterioration, but neither alone can simultaneously address biodiversity conservation, food security, and health. Integrated interventions deliver the largest ecological benefits while advancing food security and health, supporting biodiversity conservation and sustainable food-system.

This presentation will showcase two recent MAgPIE studies exploring how land-system transformations associated with dietary transitions and with the climate mitigation targets of the Paris Agreement affect the biosphere. For these studies, MAgPIE was coupled with the high-resolution land-allocation model SEALS (Spatial Economic Allocation Landscape Simulator) in order to assess landscape and habitat change for nearly 28,000 vertebrate species at high spatial and thematic detail. The results highlight key synergies and limitations of dietary transitions and land-based mitigation strategies in halting habitat loss and achieving the conservation targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.